


Don't Say A Word

by mightyscrub



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: Canon Divergence, Death, Gen, Grieving, post MGS4
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-31
Updated: 2016-05-31
Packaged: 2018-07-11 07:03:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,331
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7034887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mightyscrub/pseuds/mightyscrub
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Now in her teens, Sunny finds herself drawn back home, only to realize that her father is looking less and less like Otacon these days.  (Post old!Snake death, grieving and rebuilding.  A bit of canon divergence cus I wanted the Jupiter family to get more time together, don't look at me)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Don't Say A Word

**Author's Note:**

> I have a lot of feelings about these people persevering through incredible hardships and finding their own messy definition of happiness.

Throughout much of her life, Sunny had drifted around under assumed names, a last-ditch effort by her fathers to let her live something like a normal childhood post-NOMAD, but she had never been a normal child to begin with.

Now, with her nineteenth birthday not far off, she went by only the name she was most proud of.

Sunny Emmerich.

The whole world took notice.

Of course all sorts of secretive folks had heard of Hal, of Dave in particular, the sort of secretive folks who ran the world. Her status as a tech prodigy got her even further than Hal’s connections, and she got her pick of which worldwide programs got blessed with her expertise. Her youth was something of a cover—people at coffee shops wouldn’t expect this young woman at the end of her teens to be an underground superstar—but didn’t serve as a deterrent to her employers. Hal had always frowned at this fact, but he let her make her own decisions because he knew better than anybody else what she was capable of. He seemed very relieved when she wound up mostly drifting towards space programs.

It had been a long time since they’d seen each other in person. Sunny moved out when she was 16, not because she didn’t like living with Hal but because the world was a big place and she was already making her mark on it.

She knew he kept tabs on her (mostly because she could spot his electronic footprints perfectly well, thank you very much) and they talked often, but lately she’d been noticing something… off.

Perhaps it had been a long change, actually, something she couldn’t quite pinpoint the start of. Suddenly there was a problem, and she was wondering when that had happened. Hal had always been pretty well put-together, in a rumpled way but he knew what he was doing. Nowadays, though, it seemed like the bags under his eyes were more pronounced, his face gaunt over late-night skype calls, and he’d forget things in something of a fog.

She was worried about him.

Without much pretense one night she sent the simple e-mail: I’m coming to visit : )

x

He sent her a key to his new apartment, urging her to let herself in because of his unpredictable work schedule.

Now as the taxi pulled up to her destination, she gave a generous tip before stepping out to the curb with her laptop case and flower-print duffel.

Hal Emmerich could live just about anywhere in the world he wanted, but he had chosen a modest apartment complex at the edge of Chicago, the façade white but perhaps too white, like they’d only recently redone a chipping paint job.

His place was on the third floor (no elevator), and under the placard 3A hung a chubby maneki-neko, smiling beatifically. Sunny rolled it atop her fingers with her own smile and removed it from its string into her pocket. This was her welcome home gift.

It was her first time at this apartment, but from the moment she stepped in she knew it was indeed home.

Some subtle smell hit her senses and brought her memory spiraling warmly into nostalgia… It was only a whiff, and she tried to smell it again, figure out what it was or where it came from, but perhaps she had imagined it in the first place. She was brought back to their first apartment after the NOMAD. They moved a lot for awhile, but there would always be something special about that first home in her memory, cooking eggs for her fathers who had fallen into something finally like peace. She remembered the pink curtains in the kitchen.

There weren’t curtains here, just a boxish window over the sink. A half-kitchen stood adjacent to a small living room with a black leather sofa and television. She drifted around, plopping her things absently onto the coffee table.

There was a little alcove, some weirdness of the room’s architecture, that Hal had stuffed an end table into, and on this table was a smattering of framed photographs that Sunny examined carefully.

There were a lot of Dave, because he was hardly ever the photographer. Much to his chagrin, because he’d always hated getting his picture taken. Sunny remembered with some embarrassment the camera she and Hal invented when she was 8, and how she’d accosted just about everyone for their pictures, but Dave most of all. It had become something of a joke for her to say “cheese!” and for him to frown deeply. He had humored her anyway.

Sunny saw herself among the pictures too, a kid, always a little photo shy as well but with the sort of half-smile that meant Hal was behind the camera. When she was with Dave, he had a sort of solid protective presence at her side. In one she was asleep in Dave’s lap but it was blurred by the cameraman’s finger in the corner (Hal no doubt). Hal must’ve liked it enough to keep it anyway.

Hal had the widest in-photo smile, but it rarely met his eyes, a reflexive self-deprecating thing. Weirdly, it seemed like the smaller his smiles were, the more honesty was in them. There was a very old photo with small-smile Hal and a Dave that looked much younger than Sunny had ever known him, and she didn’t know who had taken it, yet this photo had always existed at all of their homes.

They made an odd family, didn’t they? Not entirely facebook perfection.

But where was--?

Ah. The bedroom.

The first room in the hall after the bathroom was clean, with new sheets on the bed, but clearly not used much. It seemed like this was where Sunny would be staying.

That meant the bedroom at the end of the hall had to be Hal’s, and peeking in confirmed her theory immediately. There was technology everywhere. Messy. Very Hal workspace.

His bed was made haphazardly, the black duvet wrinkled, and right up above the headboard was a floating bookshelf, mostly empty except for an unassuming brown pot, round and plain with a darker earthen lid held tight by metal hinges.

This was who she was looking for.

Sunny kissed her index finger, then leaned over the bed to press the kiss to this pot, gently circumnavigating another small photo, a simple loose polaroid leaning against the wall.

“Hi Dave,” she said fondly. “I’m home.”

Dave smiled from the polaroid, a rare truly smiling picture, and thus one of Hal’s favorites.

x

Sunny thought she might surprise Hal by making dinner, but found absolutely no food in the house except for ramen and peanut butter. She was snacking on the peanut butter with a spoon when the front door’s lock jangled.

Hal walked in and he looked… good! She tried not to be too relieved by that. He was wearing a dark blue dress shirt, and she noticed how the gray hairs at his temple had increased since they last saw each other. All the details of his face that didn’t come through over skype got carefully catalogued, refreshing her memory.

His smile was enormous, if somewhat harried, and he didn’t even put down his laptop bag, just strode over and hugged her, peanut butter jar and all.

“Holy cow, you’re taller,” he said when they parted, pressing up his glasses.

“Not really.”

“You definitely look taller.”

Sunny’s cheeks were hurting from smiling so much at him so she got another glob of peanut butter instead. 

His smile faltered with realization. “I forgot about dinner.”

“It’s ok, Hal. I can make a mean ‘boiled water’.”

He laughed jumpily. “Found the cat?”

“He’s a cute one.” She swung the maneki-neko out of her pocket between her fingers. “I like them fat.” 

They ordered a pizza and holed up on the sofa presumably to watch (and laugh at) bad Hulu anime, but they wound up talking more instead. Hal always had so many questions, genuine interest in her projects, a certain worry creasing his brow that would smooth over into excitement when she really got into the techno babble. 

She had questions of her own of course. How are you doing? Are you actually eating? Are there any cute ladies or gents at the office wink wink?

But his answers were always cursory. I’m just my boring old self. There’s nothing interesting about that.

The more she watched him, the more she noticed the new lines that had appeared around his eyes, new physical pieces of stress and… something else.

She knew he dated people, but she also knew it never went far. He kept people at arm’s length to begin with, and it seemed like that chasm was only deepening these days.

She perched her chin in her hand, elbow on knee, and criticized their current anime’s depiction of space travel.

He jostled her shoulder. She’d surprised some glee out of him. “That’s my girl.”

Was she the only person who could make him smile like that? Sometimes it felt like she was the only one with the power to help him, but she wasn’t sure how.

It hurt. For so long he had been the only person in _her_ life, and it had felt like he just did it out of pure love, some force guiding him onward. Didn’t she love him too? Shouldn’t she have some guiding principal at her back?

He must have been really tired because he started to nod off relatively early, and for a moment she rested her head idly on his shoulder and watched the rest of the bad show, thinking maybe she could just leech off some of his sadness through her cheek. The power of father-daughter osmosis.

x

Sunny had been eleven when Dave died.

They tried different schools for her around then, a drudging process of moving from district to district, always finding that she was too advanced for even the accelerated programs and also not very good at making friends with her often much older peers. At eleven she was a freshman in high school. A weird kid genius.

That day, a very white-faced guidance counselor quietly called Sunny out of her homeroom.

Sunny knew immediately that what she’d been dreading for so long had happened. Dave’s health had been getting more and more frail and… well. She just knew it would happen like this.

In the hallway, the counselor wrung her hands, her eyes big and remorseful.

“Mary…” she said. That was Sunny’s fake name here. “Honey, I’m so sorry… Your father has passed away.”

The words were pretty meaningless after Sunny already _knew_. She didn’t know what to say. It almost felt like she was supposed to comfort this big-eyed woman for dropping the news. Sunny just nodded.

With a huff of emotion, the counselor pulled Sunny into a bosomy hug and started crying over her, and Sunny had never felt so distant from a person in her entire life. She didn’t want this woman’s pity, this woman who didn’t even know her family or what they meant to each other.

She was passed from one weepy counselor to the next until Hal arrived to pick her up. When he walked through the doors, she looked him up and down very carefully.

He was wearing a gray jacket and jeans and he looked terribly normal, slightly unkempt but not more than usual, except that his eyes behind his glasses expressed the same hollow, don’t-know-what-to-do feeling that Sunny was experiencing. She hugged him tightly around the middle and his hand rested in its place on top of her head, gentle but firm. Present. She was so glad he was still here with her, that they still had each other even if…

She couldn’t finish that thought quite yet.

They didn’t talk in the car, except that Hal drove really slow and kept a hand on Sunny’s knee.

When they were almost to their then-apartment, he said in a somewhat croaking voice, “I love you so much, Sunny. You’re the most important person in the universe.”

He didn’t say stuff like that often. Sunny always knew it was true, because she knew him, but he didn’t usually say it out loud like that.

“Dave loved you too,” he said. “More than anybody.”

That’s when Sunny started to cry, at first quietly, then with big wracking sobs as she pressed her back into her seat and wailed straight from the chest, so sad it made her face hurt. Hal’s grip on her knee tightened and he just let her cry, because that’s what she needed to do. She pulled and pressed at his fingers, her hands working on their own as she hunched in on herself.

She never got to see Dave’s body or anything. The threat of FOXDIE necessitated a rather unorthodox mortuary process… Hal somehow swindled a way to get Dave’s ashes though, and one day brought home an unassuming brown pot that Sunny pressed her palm to reverently.

It struck her that she didn’t see Hal cry during that time. Sunny herself would be doing something, going about her day, and just suddenly find herself sobbing uncontrollably, and somehow Hal always appeared then to hold her shoulder or hug her. She thought maybe this was how he grieved, that by taking care of her and loving her through this he’d get some sort of closure. Maybe he didn’t need to cry.

Maybe she’d been wrong about that part.

x

In Chicago, in the morning, Sunny perched her maneki-neko against the bathroom mirror while she brushed her teeth. It was early, because Sunny was used to getting up early, and she had assumed Hal was still sleeping in his room until she went back into the hall and noticed a telltale blue glow along the edge of his door.

She crept to that bedroom at the end of the hall and peered inside.

The blue was from a computer screen of course. He was hunched over his laptop in bed, in a holey sweater. The duvet underneath him was wrinkled but not nearly enough that he’d slept under it all night, or even for very long.

He was intent on working, a slight frown creasing his forehead (lines, Sunny thought). He didn’t even notice her watching, and it wasn’t like she was being that sneaky.

Above him, Dave’s ashes sat on the bookshelf, the little brown pot reflecting the blue light slightly at the curve. It was almost like Dave was there watching over Hal’s shoulder.

It explained why Dave was in the bedroom, but Sunny found no consolation in this scene. Gosh, what expression would be on Dave’s face to see them like this? To see those hollows in Hal’s face? Quietly, she stepped back into the hall and went to make her own bed.

x

First on the agenda was groceries. She would stock up and feed him, and then maybe she could coax out the rest of his mess.

Problem: Sunny had never been the best cook. But that was fine. She would get something simple off the internet and make that.

She left Hal a note with lots of flower doodles on a post-it in the kitchenette, then headed out early to catch a local farmer’s market. Only the best for this mission!

She returned in the afternoon, with altogether more breads and vegetables than she or Hal probably knew the names of. He was at work by then, and she rolled up her sleeves, raring for action.

Internet research. Chopping! Vegetables, noodles. She’d make a sort of stir fry. Easy. Piece of cake.

The more she stirred and fried, however, the less like food it looked.

With a scrunched up nose, she threw out this batch and tried again.

And again.

The smells in the apartment were not appetizing at all as evening encroached, as she stabbed at the caked-on black char in her frying pan with a spatula.

It was just a burnt mess.

Like my eggs, she thought bitterly. Cooking had always been such a desperate thing for her as a child. Maybe that was why she never grew to like it that much after moving out. It was a way for her to take care of her dads, and when that worked it was great.

But when it didn’t work, it was awful.

There had been so much tension during their last months on the NOMAD. Nobody’s needs got met because everybody was frantically just trying to stay afloat and together. Sunny had hated watching Dave deteriorate. There was nothing more powerless than a child in a crisis.

After that final mission, it had seemed like things got so much better. They had a few years together, and those were such precious, happy years. Dave had been human again. Hal had been able to breathe. Sunny had had her family, in brief wonderful moments.

Then Dave died.

Now, eighteen-year-old Sunny scowled as she scraped burnt gristle off the pan into the trash.

Hal’s timing was terrible. Of course he chose that exact moment to come home, front lock jangling.

“Is something on fire?” he asked, alarmed.

With her back to him she put on her best smile before turning around. He wasn’t the only one who could fake it.

“Just experimenting!” she said brightly, blowing stray hair out of her eyes. “I went and got some food.”

“You didn’t have to do that…” he said, idly examining the vegetables on the counter. He picked up a large orangeish squash. “… What’s this?”

“No idea!” she said, sticking the pan in the sink.

He knew her too well. He was getting suspicious, she could feel it in the calculating way he was watching her.

“How about some ramen?” he asked finally, opening a cabinet.

“Huh? But I got all this stuff!”

“Exactly! Don’t you think it’ll go great with ramen?” He was already opening a family pack of beef. “We can chop up some vegetables on top, make it real fancy. How’s that?”

She avoided his gaze, feeling useless. In the end he’d wound up taking care of her again, huh? “Sounds great,” she said lamely.

x

“You sure you aren’t seeing anyone?”

She asked him when he had a forkful of ramen halfway to his mouth. He shrugged a shoulder. “Not really… Are you?”

“Not me,” she said. He was changing the subject again. “Come on, nobody?”

He put his bowl back on the throw pillow in his lap. They were dining over Hulu again, on the black sofa.

“What’s this all about?” he asked.

“What’d you do last weekend?” she asked back.

He sighed deeply. “I guess I went out on Saturday.”

She brightened. “And?”

“It was just a small thing.”

“Someone from work?”

“Yeah… She was nice.”

“Are you going to go out with her again?”

He was frowning down at his bowl, stirring the noodles listlessly in the broth, and shook his head. “No. She didn’t like me that much.”

“Come on,” Sunny said skeptically, because he was always like this, unable to understand that he was, in fact, a likable person.

“ _I_ didn’t like _her_ that much,” he amended, looking chagrined.

“…Oh.”

He gestured to the television slightly with his fork. “They’ve got Escaflowne. Have you seen that one?”

“Yeah…” she said, staring down at her bowl.

“… Sunny?”

“I think I’m gonna go to bed.” She smiled her biggest smile. “Sorry, Hal! I just got real tired all of the sudden.”

He was worried but he let her go, and she damn near ran to her room.

Why couldn’t she fix things for him?

How come her love always had to come out misshapen and amateur?

x

That night they didn’t talk much while respectively getting ready for bed, Hal sensing enough to keep his distance but not really understanding why. While he was taking a shower in the bathroom, Sunny crept to his room, not sure what her feet were doing taking her there until she was standing at his bedside looking up at Dave on the bookshelf.

The polaroid smiled. Had she ever seen Dave smile that big in real life? She desperately tried to remember, pull out some perfect mental image of him from the past, but it had been so long that he always seemed to blur at the edges in her mind.

Her eyes went swimmy and her next blink let loose a pair of tears down her cheeks.

Without thinking, she was suddenly stepping up onto the bed in her bare feet and scooping the pot off the shelf, hugging it to her chest like a stolen treasure and hurrying back to the sofa in the living room.

Why was she being so ridiculous? She sat cross-legged in the middle cushion, hugging the pot in her lap like some sort of warped lapdog, and just started sobbing. Big fat tears ran all down her face, and she hiccupped on snot and her own throat and this awful feeling of failure and brokenness cinching her chest.

At some point the water in the other room turned off. A jangle of shower curtain.

She was still crying like an idiot over Dave’s pot when Hal finally emerged, in his holey sweater again and gray sweatpants, looking very unsavvy and also a wide-eyed sort of devastated.

“Sunny…” He circled around the sofa and pushed back the coffee table so he could crouch down in front of her, knees snapping. He put his hands on her legs, carefully not looking at the pot, and gazed up at her with wet hair and worry behind his glasses. “Sunny, please tell me what’s wrong.”

No… Here it was again. She didn’t want him to help her. For just this once she had wanted so badly for it to be the other way around.

“You miss him so much,” she sobbed, and realization finally crossed his face, his shoulders sagging.

“Sunny…” He rose enough to slide onto the sofa next to her, wrapping an arm around her shoulders and pulling her close. She tucked her head under his chin, gripping Dave protectively to her chest.

“You’ll always love him and it’ll never get easier, will it?” she asked.

“… It probably won’t,” he said softly, and a big gulping cry shook out of her. “Sunny. You lost him too.”

“But you didn’t grieve him,” she bit out earnestly. “You didn’t get to. I hogged it all.”

“That’s not true.”

She just whimpered and stuffed her wet face into his sweater, not believing him.

For a long moment he held her there, his hand running up and down her shoulder soothingly.

“Maybe there’s some things we should talk about,” he murmured. “I’m sorry. I’m not always the best at… saying things. Neither was Dave. But you’re the most important person in the universe, Sunny. You always were.”

She shook her head, and his grip around her tightened.

“It’s true, I loved Dave very much,” Hal continued, his voice cracking slightly. “… I still do. We always sort of loved each other. But that’s not why we decided to become a family, him and me. We decided that because of you. We wanted to make that promise for your sake.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“That means you were responsible for so much happiness for us, Sunny. You made our last moments together _real_.”

She shook her head again and he rested his other hand firmly on the pot in her arms, palm to the clamped-shut lid.

“You’re right, I’m unhappy that he’s gone,” he said. “But that’s not your job to fix. You already…” He swallowed, and she realized he was fighting his own tears as well. “You gave us a tremendous gift, Sunny, please remember that.”

The awfulness in Sunny’s chest swelled into something still overwhelming but less awful, maybe even the start of something good, if she could stop shaking.

“I just want you to be happy, Hal.”

He laughed, a high squeaking thing that spiked through his tears. “I am happy,” he said. “I have you for my daughter.”

He patted the pot strangely, as if placating Dave, and a choking laugh squeezed out of Sunny as well.

“I’m sorry I stole him,” she said, and they both broke into teary giggles.

“I don’t think he minds. Not one bit.”

x

The week went quickly after that, the focus shifting from some sort of holy dad-fixing mission to simply spending time with Hal and enjoying a brief vacation. Lots of anime, a few chilly autumn walks. They cooked together, badly.

When it was time for her to head back to her own place, he walked with her clean out the door and down the three flights of stairs, hand hovering behind her back, a protective absent sort of gesture.

The cab was already at the curb.

“Um,” he said, running his hand down her arm. “It was great seeing you.” She turned to him and they smiled at each other for a moment, both of them always awkward with goodbyes. “I’ll take care of myself,” he promised. “I guess I was so wrapped up in me that I forgot about important people worrying.”

She snorted, glancing away sheepishly.

His smile gained confidence, and he offered her a hand.

She knew this part. She set her duffel on the ground and squared off with him.

A secret handshake, passed down from fathers to daughter.

Left hand sideways. Up down. Back forward.

Clasp hands at the end.

Except this time, Hal added something new. He pulled her forward into a tight hug and she grinned into his chest.

“I love you,” he told her, his smile small and happy in her hair.

“I love you too, Hal.” It still felt strange to call him Dad, even now, but the sentiment was there.

I love you. Until next time, I’ll think of you. Thank you for being by my side.


End file.
